Burnable Absorbers in CANDU Fuel Bundle Depletion with UWB1 Code

Abstract

UWB1 nuclear fuel depletion code is being developed by Lovecký et al to conduct burnable neutronabsorber research for fast and thermal reactor designs. The use of neutron absorber in CANDU to gain operating margin was proposed by Chan et al. The development of UWB1 and the use of nabsorbers in CANDU were published in 2014. Research and development are still ongoing. This paper describes the simulation of CANDU fuel bundle depletion. The accuracy and the speed of the code are compared to WIMS, Serpent and MCNP6 reference codes. The results show that UWB1 is suitable to be used as a depletion code to study the removal of the initial transient and suppression of the plutonium peaks in CANDU fuel reactivity. UWB1 code introduces an advantage in the depletion calculation time.